We know a fair amount about the women who obtain abortions.
We know when abortions happen, usually in the first trimester. We know where they happen, occurring more often in states with more liberal abortion laws. We know a bit about who gets them, as lower-income and minority women tend to have higher abortion rates.
We know a lot less, however, about women who seek out an abortion but don't receive the service. They don't get counted in the abortion statistics. At least, not until now.
A new research project at the University of California at San Francisco is studying a group of 231 women who were turned away from 30 abortion clinics across the country. Dubbed the Turnaway Project, its researchers recruited women who had shown up at an abortion clinic days after its limit on gestational period had passed. It compares those women, who carried their pregnancies to term...